


She Used To Be Mine

by magicrainbows



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Burnt Marshmallow, Burnt marshmallows, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, Logan deserved better, Miscarriage, Misery Loves Company, Songfic, VMTAP2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicrainbows/pseuds/magicrainbows
Summary: Veronica knows she can always go to Logan, even when things are horrible.
Relationships: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars, Veronica Mars/Original Male Character
Comments: 17
Kudos: 66





	She Used To Be Mine

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly this whole thing came about because of an interview Kristen did with Refinery 29. She mentioned starring in Waitress (AHAHAHAHAHA) and then all I could hear was this song. I know it can be taken a lot of ways, and has a lot of meanings, but omg Kristen can’t hit these notes. But anyway, it is what it is.

“It happens sometimes.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“You can try again in a few months.”

“A lot of couples lose their first.”

If one more person made one more banal excuse to Veronica, she was going to scream. She didn’t give a flying fuck how much it happened or who else it happened to or why it happened.

She only cared that it happened.

Twenty-four hours ago, she had been pregnant, and now she wasn’t, and her baby was dead.

Veronica didn’t like the word “stillborn”. It was an excuse, a lie, another bullshit thing people say. Her daughter was born dead and there was no mincing words about it.

Sure, Chris had been there for her. He’d pushed the wheelchair out of the hospital and had taken all the baby stuff out of the car. He’d gotten someone--Wallace probably--to take the bassinet out of the living room, the baby bottles out of the kitchen, put a lock on the nursery since there wasn’t time to take it apart.

Chris had forgotten who he’d married though, so while he slept that first night--how could he sleep???--she’d picked the lock and gone into what would’ve been Mia’s nursery.

Veronica sat in the rocking chair her dad had bought and held the stuffed unicorn she’d purchased the day she’d discovered she was having a girl.

When she was all cried out, she locked the nursery back up, put a sweater over her pajamas and left.

She knew where she was going before she even turned the car on. She always ran to the same place when things got hard. He was always there for her, waiting, when her life got too hard, too real, too painful.

He’d been the one she’d turned to when her first partner was killed on the job, when her dad got remarried, on the night before her wedding.

She’d also gone to him, nine months ago, when a child she was trying to protect was gunned down right in front of her, by his own mother. She’d shot the mother, partially in self-defense since she did have a gun on several police officers, but also partially in revenge for killing Andy. He was an innocent, and the one person who should’ve protected him had killed him. Veronica thought it was poetic karma, but she kept that part out of her report, instead going for “fear of further loss of life”.

That case had shook her to her core, and Logan had been there for her, like he always was. They’d had three amazing days and nights together before she returned to her job and her husband and her life.

Logan was waiting for her on the porch with a bottle of scotch. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he was shivering.

He held out his left arm and when Veronica collapsed against him, he tucked the blanket around her, wordlessly holding her while she sobbed. Somewhere between the crying and the drinking, she’d fallen asleep.

The sun was coming up when she woke up, her eyes red and scratchy from all the crying. She reached for the scotch, surprised there was anything left in the bottle.

“She was mine, wasn’t she?” he asked while she drank.

“You loved the name Mia. You told me that once.”

Logan nodded. No other words were necessary.

Eventually they made their way inside. He tucked her into his bed and laid beside her, on top of the covers, not knowing what to say or do.

He heard his phone buzz downstairs and carefully hurried to get it before it woke her up.

“I just want to be sure that she’s okay,” Keith said when he answered. Logan had figured out a few years ago that Keith knew something about their arrangement, but when they passed each other in grocery stores and bars, they simply nodded their hellos and moved on. Logan never demanded to know why Keith’s daughter was content to use him for sex while marrying a man she didn’t love, and Keith never asked Logan why he and Veronica didn’t grow the fuck up and just date like they both really wanted to.

“She’s here, she’s sleeping, she’s a little drunk, she’s definitely not okay.”

Logan waited out Keith’s silence. After around five minutes, he said, “Thank you.”

“Anytime.” Logan hung up and wanted to throw the phone across the room. He wanted to break everything in the house, possibly set the place on fire, and drive his car into a wall.

He’d suspected all along that the baby Veronica carried was his, but he never asked her and she never volunteered anything. Not even when she’d shown up at his place seven months pregnant, riding him like a mechanical bull while their baby kicked and he could feel it against his ribs.

For the first time since Mac had texted him to tell him what happened, he cried. He cried for his daughter and he cried for Veronica. 

By four o’clock, Veronica was still asleep and Logan crawled back in bed beside her, mostly to check on her. At one point she reached for him and he pulled her against his chest, letting her sob herself back to sleep.

The next morning, Veronica woke to find the bed empty beside her, a stack of towels and a set of sweats in her size on the nightstand. She sipped the coffee he’d left for her and wondered why life had to be so hard.

An hour later she found Logan in the kitchen. He wordlessly handed her a plate of toast and she took it to the island and sat down, looking out at the ocean.

Logan set her phone next to her plate. “I charged it for you.”

She ignored all the texts from her father, from Wallace, from Chris. She told Mac she was fine because Mac would spread the word around. There were texts she ignored from coworkers too, and one from her doctor that she couldn’t.

“Shit,” she put her head in her hands. “I have a doctor’s appointment today.”

“I’ll drive you home,” Logan said automatically.

Veronica forced herself to take a bite of her toast. “Can you just drive me to the office, please?”

Logan wanted to ask a ton of questions but he ignored them and said, “Of course.”

He waited in his car, even though it was hot with the sun beating down on it, because he didn’t think she should go in to see her OBGYN with a man who wasn’t her husband. He texted Keith to tell him he’d taken her, and again when they got back to his place and Veronica was taking a nap.

“Is she coming home?” Keith texted him back.

“You’d have to ask her that,” Logan replied.

Two days later, Keith showed up with a suitcase full of Veronica’s things.

“Do you want me to wake her?” Logan asked.

Keith shook his head. “She hasn’t called me back. She needs space, I guess. I can’t imagine…..”

Logan didn’t say “Me either,” because he very much knew how Veronica was feeling. He just nodded in agreement.

“Just call if you need anything, okay?” Keith asked.

“I will. Thanks for this, I know she’ll appreciate it.”

Logan was making lunch when Veronica came downstairs. He left her phone on the table like he did every day and she scrolled through it without calling or texting anyone back.

“I have another doctor’s appointment next week,” Veronica turned her phone off and put it in Logan’s junk drawer. “After that, can you take me to New York?”

He would take her to the moon if it would make her feel better, but he didn’t think anything could do that.

“Sure,” he tried to smile at her but it was impossible. “We can go to New York.”

“Thank you.”

It was weird, this time they were spending together. Logan worried that she should be with her dad, with her husband, but she got hysterical when he tried to bring it up so he decided to let her be. It wasn’t his place to interfere with her grief process.

Veronica read books on his Kindle. They watched movies that she really didn’t pay attention to. She occasionally suggested things she wanted to do in New York. They were still sleeping side by side in his bed, Veronica usually crying herself to sleep and clinging to him. The thing between them had shifted from wild and sexual to something else. Something more like a marriage, he thought a lot of the time, but he never said it.

The morning they left for New York, it poured rain. Logan had called Keith to tell him and he thought getting Veronica out of Neptune was a good idea.

Logan wasn’t sure what Veronica had in mind, but she’d printed a list of things she wanted to do and had already made dinner reservations and bought theatre tickets online when they arrived. They went to fondue restaurants and dive pizza joints and Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate. She led him around museums, wordlessly looking at paintings and sculptures and occasionally photographs. Logan realized only when he saw a photo of a woman cradling an infant that he hadn’t seen a photo of his daughter. He wondered to himself if Veronica had any--she must, on her phone if nothing else--but he didn’t dare ask her. Maybe he would ask Mac, since asking Keith would raise too much suspicion, and Mac was an excellent secret keeper.

“I got tickets for Waitress tonight,” Veronica announced at breakfast when they’d been in New York for a week. “And then we can go home tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Logan was in the habit of accepting whatever she wanted, because didn’t she at least deserve that?

Logan was surprised to see that Veronica had gotten seats as far up in the balcony as possible. There were only two other people in their row, several seats apart from them. They’d had floor seats for Frozen and the other shows they’d seen, so this choice seemed odd to him.

He paged through the Playbook and wondered why Veronica would pick a play about a pregnant woman. He thought maybe she wasn’t aware of the plot--he hadn’t seen the movie--but he didn’t get a chance to ask her. Veronica took his hand in hers as the lights dimmed and he found himself watching her rather than watching the play.

She cried through most of it, and Logan wished he could do something for her besides hold her hand and pass down the package of tissues the woman at the end of the row brought to him.

“I’m okay,” she said during intermission, rubbing at her eyes and looking embarrassed. “I’m gonna run to the ladies’ room.”

While she was gone, Logan checked his phone and saw a text from Keith. He let him know that they were flying back the next afternoon and turned it back off before Veronica returned.

“My eyes look like a crack whore’s,” Veronica returned to her seat, a fresh pack of tissues in her hand. She held it up and shook her head. “There are two more of these in my purse. Women just kept handing them to me.”

“Your dad checked in.”

Veronica bit her lip. “He’s probably so mad at me.”

“He’s just worried about you.”

“I didn’t mean to check out, I didn’t mean to just…..I just had to not be there.” Logan nodded and she went on. “And the longer I’ve been away, the easier it got. But I need to stop running and there’s things I need to say, and do, so…..that’s why I suggested going home.”

“I understand. Whatever you need.”

Veronica grabbed his hand and was going to say something else, but the lights flickered and then dimmed and she turned back to the stage.

Logan noticed that Veronica didn’t cry as much during the second act, until Jenna moved center stage. Veronica tightened her grip on his hand and started to quietly sob before the protagonist even started singing.

//It's not simple to say  
That most days I don't recognize me  
That these shoes and this apron  
That place and its patrons  
Have taken much more than I gave them

It's not easy to know  
I'm not anything like I used be  
Although it's true I was never   
Attention's sweet center  
I still remember that girl

She's imperfect, but she tries  
She is good, but she lies  
She is hard on herself  
She is broken and won't ask for help  
She is messy, but she's kind  
She is lonely most of the time  
She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie  
She is gone, but she used to be mine

It's not what I asked for  
Sometimes life just slips in through a back door  
And carves out a person and makes you believe it's all true  
And now I've got you

And you're not what I asked for  
If I'm honest, I know I would give it all back  
For a chance to start over   
And rewrite an ending or two  
For the girl that I knew

Who'll be reckless, just enough  
Who'll get hurt, but who learns how to toughen up  
When she's bruised and gets used by a man who can't love  
And then she'll get stuck  
And be scared of the life that's inside her  
Growing stronger each day 'til it finally reminds her  
To fight just a little  
To bring back the fire in her eyes  
That's been gone, but used to be mine

She is messy, but she's kind  
She is lonely most of the time  
She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie  
She is gone, but she used to be mine\\\

When the song ended and the entire audience broke out in uproarious applause, Veronica realized she was in Logan’s lap. She curled into his shoulder and let herself cry it out.

By the time the lights came on, she was back in her own seat and had dried her eyes. “I’m really okay now,” she assured him. “I guess I just needed to get that out. And now I need a drink.”

They found themselves in a nearby bar getting plastered. They talked and they laughed but neither of them said anything about the play or the song or the fact that Veronica had pretty much cried for two hours straight.

Four or five drinks in, Logan started drinking water and coffee while Veronica kept throwing them back.

“You’re too nice to me,” she slurred. “I don’t deserve it.”

“I’m not, and it’s fine.”

“I’m not a good person,” she took a sip of Logan’s water and made a face. “I thought it was vodka.”

He ordered her a Coke and while she sipped it, she kept talking.

“I made all the wrong decisions, you know? I never should’ve left Neptune, left Hearst,” she met his eyes, though hers were slits. “Left you.”

Logan was suddenly very uncomfortable. “You had your reasons.”

“I didn’t,” she chewed on an ice cube and paused. “I was running. That’s what I do. It’s what I always do. And when I graduated, I came back and started running to you.”

He watched her but didn’t say anything.

“Things get rough or uncomfortable or whatever, and I show up at your door. You let me into your house and your bed and you never ask questions.”

“I like it when you show up at my door,” he didn’t mean to say it, but it slipped out. He blamed the booze. He was only buzzed now, but he still felt fuzzy and had to try and be careful what he said to her. He downed his coffee and ordered another cup.

“How come you never asked me why I got married?”

“I know why you got married,” Logan swore under his breath. That just slipped out too, courtesy of the scotch they’d drank earlier.

“Okay, why?” she was leaning on the bar now, sipping her Coke sideways and looking at him the way she did when they were in high school.

“It was easy.” Logan admitted. “Your heart wasn’t involved, so it wasn’t a risk.”

“It was like a business arrangement,” she giggled. “I’m hungry!” she grabbed a bar menu and studied it. “Missy!” she flagged down the bartender they’d gotten to know intimately in the past few hours. “Can I get this pretzel cheesy thing?”

The bartender refilled Veronica’s Coke and turned to Logan. “Anything for you?”

“Potato skins,” he figured he was already screwing everything up by having this conversation so why not blow his healthy diet too? It might have been the booze or the physical exhaustion he’d felt for days, but something about dipping the cheesy, bacon-y potato bites in scallion drenched sour cream sounded amazing.

“I almost didn’t go out with him,” Veronica offered after a few minutes. When she realized she had Logan’s full attention she went on. “He wasn’t even cute, you know? He’s kinda like a hippo,” she giggled. 

“He looks nothing like a hippo,” Logan said but he laughed.

“Maybe it’s a rhino,” Veronica mused. “This girl in Narcotics set us up. I thought it was ridiculous. A cop dating a prosecutor? Ridiculous.”

“Sometimes, I think you being a cop is ridiculous,” Logan admitted. God, he really needed to sober up. Maybe the food would help.

“It is,” she sipped her Coke and giggled. “It’s the stupidest thing. I don’t even know how it happened.”

Logan did. She’d told him several times how a recruiter had shown up at Stanford and she’d wound up taking the information back to her dorm and applying to the academy that night.

“I don’t love him,” their food arrived and Veronica was quiet for a few minutes, scooping up mounds of the cheese dip with the pretzel bites.

Logan ate in silence, not knowing what to say.

“He’s just…….there, and I don’t…..I don’t wanna be.”

“You can stay with me as long as you need to.”

“You’re sweet,” SeriousVeronica was gone and DrunkVeronica was back. “I should probably go to my dad’s and figure out what I’m gonna do now. I have to talk to my commander too, about my furlough. I don’t know how long they’re gonna give me.”

“You’re not ready to go back to work,” Logan grabbed a pretzel off her plate and popped it in his mouth.

“You didn’t get cheese!” Veronica dipped one in the sauce and fed it to him.

“It’s better with the cheese,” Logan said. “Want one of these?” he offered her his plate.

“You ate all the sour cream,” she muttered, but she ate two potato skins anyway. “Maybe I won’t go back to work,” she mused a minute later. “I’m not sure Vice is where I wanna be.”

“So transfer out.”

She shrugged. “It’s all the same, doesn’t matter what unit you’re in. Someone does something bad, you go after them.”

She yawned and Logan thought maybe they should walk back to their hotel. He flagged Missy down and closed out his tab. Veronica took the Coke to go that Missy offered and in the cold night air, she felt herself getting less drunk and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

Her arm linked through Logan’s, they walked amongst the masses of people going here and there and she sighed. “I both love and hate it here.”

“Here, this street, or here, New York?”

“Both?” she giggled. “No, I mean the city. I hate all the people and I hate how nothing stops, it’s all so crazy. I love how you can get pizza twenty-four hours a day, and everyone is so self involved they don’t care about your shit.” She stopped walking and looked at Logan. “Nowhere else in the world could you sob through a play without anyone really noticing.”

“I noticed.”

“I know,” they started walking again and she moved closer to him. “Thanks for that. For holding me and for not asking questions.”

“Isn’t that what our arrangement is?” he asked.

“Sex in exchange for silence?” she looked at the ground for a minute. “That’s basically what I asked of you.”

Logan let the booze talk for him for a minute. “It was never just sex for me.”

“Me either!” Veronica threw her empty glass out as they passed a trash can and sighed. “After we get home…..I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

“You’ll come when you’re ready,” he said honestly.

“Maybe someday,” she thought out loud as they entered the hotel, “I’ll come for good.”

Logan had dropped Veronica off at her dad’s right from the airport. He’d declined her invitation to come in, partially because he was exhausted and still a little hung over, and partially because he noticed a car in the street that he didn’t recognize, that he thought might belong to Chris. The two of them going to fisticuffs was not what Veronica needed right now.

He didn’t hear from her for three weeks. He buried himself in charity work. Planning the upcoming ceremony where he’d give out an arts scholarship in his mother’s name, arranging to send kids from St. Jude to Disneyland, gathering investors for a battered women’s shelter just outside of Neptune. Logan had just hung up on Charlie Sheen after being refused a donation when he heard a car pull up outside his kitchen. He pulled the blinds apart and saw Veronica, suitcases in hand, unloading her SUV.

He opened the front door and when she met his eyes, she shrugged at him.

“Isn’t that a little too The Notebook for us?” he teased her.

She immediately dropped the bags and ran to him. He picked her up, swung her around, kissed her until they were dizzy.

When he set her down, she leaned against the door and smiled up at him.

“I’m finally ready.”


End file.
